KIRKUS REVIEW

A faux memoir of the novelist’s grandfather, whose life as an
engineer, veteran, and felon offers an entree into themes of heroism and
imagination.

When “Michael Chabon,” the narrator of this novel, was growing
up, his maternal grandparents were steeped in mystery and mythology. His
grandmother was a tight-lipped Holocaust survivor with a fixation on tarot
cards, while his grandfather was a World War II Army officer who’d also done
time in prison. The novel is largely Chabon’s (Telegraph Avenue, 2012,
etc.) effort to understand his grandfather’s wilder escapades. Why did he try
to strangle a former business partner with a telephone cord? What was he
thinking when he and a buddy in the Army Corps of Engineers prankishly set
explosives on a bridge in Washington, D.C.? What did he feel while he hunted
down Wernher von Braun in Germany? And, more tenderly, what did he see in the
young girl he met in Baltimore after returning home from the war? A study in
intellect, violence, and displacement, his grandfather is engaging on the
ground level while also serving as a kind of metaphor for Cold War America. And
Chabon writes tenderly about his grandparents’ relationship—his grandmother was
a horror-flick host on local TV and suffered from mental illness her husband
was ill-equipped to handle. Chabon’s theme is the storytelling (i.e., lies)
people lean on to survive through complicated times: “The world, like the Tower
of Babel or my grandmother’s deck of cards, was made out of stories, and it was
always on the verge of collapse.” A noble enough theme, but Chabon is an
inveterate overwriter who dilutes his best storytelling with more ponderous
digressions—on the manufacture of the V-2 rocket, model-making, Thomas Pynchon,
and the relationships his widowed grandfather pursued before his death. He’s
captured a fine story about the poignancy of two souls’ survival but also too
many others about plenty else besides.

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